Entrevoir les mots des murs.

Wednesday, July 19, 2006

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This book is made of poems inspired by photos taken by Tokiko, they were exhibited at the Tjibaou Cultural Center in 2003, and they are displayed in this book in a different manner. The idea which took the form of the exhibition and later this book deals with how words and pictures can help us to come back from death to life. During the events which took place between 1984 and 1988, houses were set on fire and abandoned by the inhabitants.

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After the houses were set on fire during the quasi civil war, groups of young Kanaks came to these places and even lived there. The walls were covered with drawings, graffiti and mottos.  In these places associated with violence and death, photos were shot by Tokiko, and Denis wrote beautiful poems and he gave again some sense to the words of despair and struggle written on the walls.

The poems are connected to and infused with ancestrality, nourished by the relationship with the origins of arts. The reader may establish a connection between the art of engraving stones, and the graffiti which inspired this book; then we may consider these scribbled or engraved words in burnt houses as modern caves where a new version of the relation to being, to identity and to sacred beliefs is played. With the black inscriptions on the walls, with the fires, with obscene drawings, with violent mottos, the photos and the poems are a response to historic violence as well as a replay of sacred violence. The changes in New Caledonia are echoed by the passage from immemorial chants and magical mottos to a book which is made for any reader, among the infinite community of human beings, in all the islands, in all the lands.

To buy this book : http://www.pacific-bookin.com
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ARCHIVES of July , 2006